Good, Ol' Fashioned Generation Baiting

Mark Bauerlein has a new book in which he calls the current under-30 crowd the "Dumbest Generation," though it's not really their fault so much as that they are growing up in the "digital age." The Boston Globe has pruned out "8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation". I'll give you the reasons, but for their justification, read the whole thing. In short:

1. They make excellent "Jaywalking'' targets.
2. They don't read books -- and don't want to, either.
3. They can't spell.
4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing.
5. Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.
6. They don't store the information.
7. Because their teachers don't tell them so.
8. Because they're young.

In his review of Bauerlein's book, David Robinson writes.

Adults are so busy imagining the ways that technology can improve classroom learning or improve the public debate that they've blinded themselves to the collective dumbing down that is actually taking place. The kids are using their technological advantage to immerse themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the expense of more enriching activities – like opening a book or writing complete sentences.

Mr. Bauerlein presents a wealth of data to show that young people, with the aid of digital media, are intensely focusing on themselves, their peers and the present moment. YouTube and MySpace, he says, are revealingly named: These and other top Web destinations are "peer to peer" environments in the sense that their juvenile users have populated them with predictably juvenile content. The sites where students spend most of their time "harden adolescent styles and thoughts, amplifying the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party, not spreading the works of the Old Masters."

Society seems to believe that more technology is inherently good, kind of like throwing more money at a problem. But technology and money are no substitute for quality time. I manage some of these young turks and some of the above observations do ring true.

But, I don't want to sound like the stock Scooby Doo villain complaining about "those darn kids" (especially because I always wanted to hang with the Mystery Machine crowd!). I tend to think that #8 from the Globe's list is the most relevant point of them all: "Because they're young." Remember, we were all pretty clueless once, and, like the current under-30 crowd, we didn't realize it either.

The trick is to get "those darn kids" up to speed in the ways of the professional and public world. And we need to be patient about it. We've all benefited from the guiding hand of old timers who set us straight--often with the help of a few well-placed, sarcastic "observations." It's called growing up. Eventually, they'll "get it."

The Hardest Times... If Only

An odd tangential statement from a Rhode Island Catholic article (not yet online) about the need for young adults and children to be careful online:

"You're at the most difficult period of your life," Quirk began, describing the leap from childhood to adulthood as a "hard" period. "It's challenging to make it through in one piece."

That's District Court Judge Madeline Quirk, presenting with Attorney Laura Pisaturo, and I suppose perhaps for women in such professions, it may in fact have been the case that they've never found hardship beyond the natural transitions of youth. Blue collar workers with multiple children might beg to differ — as would people with debilitating age-related diseases, as would [insert example].

When Violence Is TV

It would seem that the manifest circle whereby violence on TV produces violence in life is complete:

An afterschool fight that drew 50 to 60 student onlookers in front of Roger Williams Middle School was posted on the Web site YouTube, making Providence part of a growing phenomena in which teenagers use technology to publicize acts of violence.

When the police arrived Wednesday around 3 p.m., they saw three to five girls punching and kicking someone in front of a large crowd of students from Roger Williams as well as a nearby high school, Cooley Health & Science Technology Academy on Thurbers Avenue. ...

"Kids live in cyberspace where popularity is based on page views," she said yesterday. "We're creating a generation of kids who live in virtuality, not reality. They see themselves as the producers of their own hit shows."

The act of videotaping allows teenagers to distance themselves from violence, turning them into passive observers rather than participants who feel the victim's pain, she said.

It's long been my sense that adults underestimated the risk of steeping children in advanced technology. As I've said before, for my generation, by the time we'd gotten to Mortal Kombat, we'd logged hours on games that were clearly games, whether Super Mario Brothers or Pong. Now, not only can kids control a virtual beating, they can become the producers of reality TV violence. It's wonderful to be able to actively produce things — videos, music, and so on — that once required corporate resources, but there were mollifying restrictions that came with accessing those resources.

A Kinder, Gentler Nation

Just after headlines concerning the large American prison population and my slap-dash finding that Americans don't like criminals and feel very safe comes an interesting editorial report from BBC North America Editor Justin Webb:

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.

One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.

I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.

It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.

Glenn Reynolds credits our high level of gun ownership, but I'd suggest that the cause and effect relationships are more intricate.

Reaching for the Ring of Diversity

It appears that Rhode Island has made the national diversity news feed. Here's Roger Clegg:

Portuguese business owners in Rhode Island are upset with a proposed state law that would strip them of their official "minority" status — and the contracting set-asides that go with it. There are no heroes in this story, however, which provides a nice lesson in the perils of racial preference in an increasingly multiracial society. ...

So you can sort of feel sorry for the Portuguese. On the other hand, they aren't demanding equal treatment for all: They still want other European and Middle Eastern Americans to be discriminated against. And, if push comes to shove, they are even happy for some Portuguese companies to be discriminated against, so long as it's not them personally. Says one Portuguese owner, "I think if they're going to go through with it, people should really be grandfathered in. That's the only fair way to do it." Right!

One suspicious aspect of the whole diversity thing is that, as this sort of controversy brings into the light, it is actually quite profitable to be discriminated against. Declare "the era of discrimination is over!," and thousands of minority interests and members of the diversity industry will respond: "Not on our watch."

Caught by the Art

Jay Nordlinger brought up another familiar name in his review of a joint concert of classical violinist Hilary Hahn and folkish singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, to whose album The Animal Years a friend and coworker directed my attention a couple of years ago. Jay had a reaction similar to mine to the song "Thin Blue Flame," if I attribute his description accurately:

One of Mr. Ritter's songs was a ranty, interminable number about war and peace and capitalism and religion. I thought of late nights in a dorm room, populated by hazy undergrad sages>

As it happens, this song has often flirted with deletion from my tightly packed MP3 player precisely for being interminable and ranty. Something about it, though, has continued to intrigue me — something having to do with its meaning. To be sure, throughout most of it, with the tone set at the beginning, the lines convey an anti-religious, perhaps atheistic, message, but increasingly throughout, one gets such sentiments as "you need faith for the same reasons that it's so hard to find" and "it's hell to believe there ain't a hell of a chance." If one takes the song as a narrative, rather than an exposition of a worldview, the final paragraph transforms the meaning into a nearly Roman Catholic perspective:

I woke beneath a clear blue sky The sun a shout the breeze a sigh My old hometown and the streets I knew Were wrapped up in a royal blue I heard my friends laughing out across the fields The girls in the gloaming and the birds on the wheel The raw smell of horses and the warm smell of hay Cicadas electric in the heat of the day A run of Three Sisters and the flush of the land And the lake was a diamond in the valley's hand The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts They were coming together they pulling apart And angels everywhere were in my midst In the ones that I loved in the ones that I kissed I wondered what it was I'd been looking for up above Heaven is so big there ain't no need to look up So I stopped looking for royal cities in the air Only a full house gonna have a prayer

Musically, it's not a very good song, certainly not the best on the album. (That would be either "Wolves" or "Good Man," amid several other contenders.) Still, there's something compellingly artistic about its ambiguity — and something refreshing in the closing sense that its ambiguity tilts toward the side of hope and belief, rather than faithlessness and cynicism.

The "Lost" Generation

Falling through cracks has always been a specialty of mine. Wrong time. Wrong place. Not quite a fit. Too much of this for that. Too much there for here. Exceptions to the rule move to the back (or the front) of the room, please.

Not that I've minded, particularly. It becomes sort of definitional, and one's bound to gain perspective watching the floorboards slip by. Perhaps that's why I'm mildly amused to note that Mark Patinkin, apparently inadvertently, cuts people my age right out of the generational narrative. There was the Counterculture/Pepsi/Me/Yuppy/Baby Boom Generation. Then, "born betwen 1964 and 1974 or so," came the Baby Bust/Generation X Generation. Currently coming into its own is the Generation Y/Millennial Generation, now "age 21 to 29." Born in 1975, I'll be 33 next month. It would seem that makes me a member of the Or So Generation.

Personally, my late-'70s-born peers and I have tended to identify with the Gen-Xers, but we've always felt as if we'd just made the cut. We got the grunge thing, but most of us couldn't stay out late enough for the concerts.

I'd like to think that our slipping through these artificial cutoffs makes us a class of chronological Levites. We're not part of a defined generational tribe, but we've felt kindred to many. Our cultural sense floats between them.

On one end, we hadn't yet hit the height of our hormonal lunge when AIDS slithered onto the scene, and during our most formative years (it seems) our parents in the Divorce Generation paused for reflection. On the other end, we'd logged hours of acclimation with Super Mario Brothers before the gaming industry got as far as Mortal Kombat and Doom. MP3 players are the step after 50-disc CD changers, not two steps before playlists downloadable directly to chips in our brains. We were largely through college (if we went) by the time the Internet exploded, so it is more a place to apply research skills than the source of all knowledge, but we hadn't traveled far in our careers without it as a tool, so our comfort level is high.

Perhaps, as a subgeneration, we'll prove to be the Undramatic. If that's true, it would likely please a majority of us to fall in one of those population spans probably to be found in any society undergoing tremendous change: understanding that the innovations are cool, useful, and often beneficial to humanity, but they don't change the essence of life, just as our parents' cultural revolution didn't erase human nature.

Bringing Back the Good Old Revolution

As it happens, I thought of Ian Donnis as I flipped through a Providence Journal 1968 retrospective to which he directs his readers.

I seem to recall a certain progressive journalist's responding with incredulity to my reference a few years ago to what I thought to be generally acknowledged romanticization of the late-'60s counterculture, including the opportunity to protest war, revel in revolutionary poses, and so on.

Since that exchange, I've periodically thought how time has borne out my observation, and I won't deny that I assign a portion of the blame for the hardship of the post-invasion struggle to those in the West who broadcast the message loud, clear, and well in advance that they were willing, even eager, to make another Vietnam of Iraq — meaning most especially an outcome of defeat. The amount of damage that has done to our efforts would be impossible to calculate — nearly as impossible as breaking through one side's confidence in and the other's denial of my assessment's validity.

I'm sure some opponents of the war, whether original or latter-day, hold their opinions with honorable conviction, but I'm just as sure that some have eased into their positions as into a soft robe of nostalgia, and that is simply stomach turning.

Not Seeing the Cultural Forest for the Sexual Trees

Doesn't it often seem that modern society proceeds according the following order of operations?

1. On emotional grounds, declare a change obviously beneficial and of minimal cost, with objections dismissed as outdated or inherently bigoted.
2. Implement change.
3. Ignore evidence that the naysayers were correct.
4. Let things proceed to crisis level.
5. Restate the original objections under the protection of groundbreaking studies and disguised as much as possible as compatible notions to the original emotional impulse.

Perhaps I've overstated, but such is my general response to this sort of discovery:

An analysis of national data conducted by Child Trends, a research center that focuses on children and youth, found that sexually active teens who identify their relationships with a partner as romantic and who go out socially with that person are more likely to use contraceptives than similar teens in more-casual relationships. ...

In light of this study, Manlove said, it's not enough for parents to focus simply on whether their kids are having sex. They should engage their kids in conversations about what healthy relationships look like, pay attention to the power dynamics of any relationship and stress the importance of contraception.

Not to point out the obvious, but one way in which parents can illustrate, for their children, "what healthy relationships look like" is to raise them within the context of faithful marriages. It's sort of like being "romantic" and "going out socially" for grownups.

Of course, the Western brains aren't yet ready to let go of other ideological blankies from which the "studies" ought to encourage weening. Withholding and being selective when it comes to sex, for example, will give young ladies an edge in "power dynamics." Some adults may wish to give girls that sophisticated view of interpersonal politics whereby sex is perfectly fine, even advisable, when the scepter is betwixt feminine fingers, but recent decades haven't really proven sophistication to be a match for instinct and the reality of biological responsibility.

A second example comes between the lines of the carefully phrased instruction to "stress the importance of contraception." The moderns have learned, you see, that the advice to "use contraception" is a bit too revealing about the likely implications of the mandate. It's as if they think parents' panegyrics to contraception require merely a new choice of words to avoid exacerbating the fruits of decades of safe-sex training:

Use of contraception, in fact, is not as regular as health officials might hope. Four out of 10 sexually active students reported not using contraceptives at all or using them only infrequently. Students who reported having multiple partners were particularly likely not to use protection. ...

... For example, a teen's contraceptive use may change from partner to partner. Using birth control consistently in one relationship doesn't necessarily mean that a young person will do the same with another partner.

The new, improved (and still in-denial) message to children: It is very important that you use contraception even when the sex is casual.

"Having this baby doesn't make me any less of a man."

So how much of the Brave New World will be purely a matter of semantics?

The man who stunned the world when he announced he was pregnant gave an intimate insight into his personal life in a revealing television interview with Oprah.

Thomas Beatie stripped off for the cameras and bared his baby bump and also revealed pictures from his beauty queen days as a young woman.

However, the 34-year-old transsexual also told chat show host Oprah Winfrey that he feared for his own safety and admitted doctors had warned him his baby could be killed because of the revulsion at her birth.

As a pure example of the mainstreaming of relativism, it appears that Beatie is a man mostly because he/she claims to be so:

Beatie legally became a man after undergoing a sex change operation - but kept her female reproductive organs.

He told People magazine he decided to get pregnant after wife of five years Nancy had a hysterectomy.

He. Her. Small breasts and facial hair. Womb.

Poor child.

What the Kids Are Learning

One hesitates to make too much of isolated incidents, but then again, this isn't but so unusual a story these days, except for the decreasing age and increasing numbers:

A group of third-graders plotted to attack their teacher, bringing a broken steak knife, handcuffs, duct tape and other items for the job and assigning children tasks including covering the windows and cleaning up afterward, police said Tuesday.

The plot involving as many as nine boys and girls at Center Elementary School in south Georgia was a serious threat, Waycross Police Chief Tony Tanner said.

Where do eight/nine/ten year olds even get such ideas? I'll tell ya: we're all culpable, and unless we change our cultural ways, we're building ourselves a nightmare.

The Behavior Gap

Let me say right up front that access to healthcare must be improved and expanded, although it goes beyond the scope of this post to delve into the different understandings of the whats and hows of that mandate. Even were that goal to be achieved quickly, however, I suspect that the life expectancy gap between rich and poor would continue to increase, because I think the behavioral explanations play a large role and would bleed into matters of access:

While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:

¶Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.

¶Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.

¶Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.

¶Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.

As you can see, New York Times reporter Robert Pear offers four examples, evenly split between behavior and "the system," but the former can be as numerous as the attributes of life. Here's another, which touches on an area about which I've written copiously (from an article to which I linked yesterday):

Hymowitz points out that all classes of Americans once followed the same life script of marriage before children. When divorce rates started soaring in the 1970s, everyone was fleeing their marriages. But then the classes started diverging. The Economist cites statistics that show among college-educated women married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5 percent were divorced 10 years later. Among those with a high-school education or less who married in those same years, about 40 percent were divorced after a decade.

Advocates for government-propelled fixes tend to believe that forcing an expansion of access to a service will yield equal gains across groups, but that's certainly not true. Ask yourself: Would a class with a higher percentage of smokers, poor diets, and divorce be more or less likely, on average, to make full use of even completely prepaid medical services?

As I said, our healthcare system is most definitely in trouble, but change must begin with the culture.

Extremism in the Service of Vice Is No Virtue

Is our society so corrupt that we must remake the argument against prostitution? The seediness, peril, and potential for corruption ought to be clear enough, but they are ultimately reasons for taxation and regulation. Have we been so seduced by an anything-your-heart-desires notion of freedom that we must hesitate over a state-level ban?

Lovers of freedom will certainly find an attractive simplicity in George Carlin's old reasoning that sex is legal, selling's legal, so selling sex should be legal. A step beyond simplicity, however, it becomes apparent that one could just as reasonably suggest that sex is legal, being in public is legal, so having sex in public should be legal, and few of those who would tolerate prostitution (I hope) would accept the requirement that we allow pornographic street theater. No, just as being in public changes the nature of the sexual act, so too does its being for sale.

At the same time, the potential states of a particular thing or act affect its essential meaning. Either we allow it to be in the nature of sex to be salable, or we treat its sale as unnatural. Our choice between the two makes a difference in the import of our decisions about whether and when to give it voluntarily.

Such cultural reasoning isn't generally carried out on an individual basis. The teenage girl contemplating her first sexual encounter won't look to the legal and social treatment of prostitution to gauge the significance of that to which she's being pressured. She might, however, give her submission a deeper level of thought — perhaps even lingering over her intentions and hopes for the future — if her choice is made within a culture that holds sex as too intimate to be commodified. Too sacred to be permitted the attenuating pull of market forces.

(Did I just say "sacred"? Well, yes. Part of our broader illness is our confusion about whether it is appropriate for our pluralistic society to treat certain things as sacred. It is entirely appropriate, as long as we don't hand definitional authority to the priestly caste of a particular religion.)

In the course of her consideration, the young lady would find the purpose of sex to be an unavoidable factor. In largest part, sex affects her future via its essentially procreative nature, with the related impact on that biological and emotional tangle between partners. The thread runs deep:

Economists believe humans act rationally (a somewhat irrational belief, if you ask me), so some conclude that all this out-of-wedlock childbearing is a logical response to market forces, not the result of something as amorphous as "culture." Since many working-class men do not offer the financial stability they used to provide, women see little incentive to marry them. As Obama said, "[M]any black men simply cannot afford to raise a family." (The out-of-wedlock birthrate among black Americans is close to 70 percent.) I'm trying to follow the logic here. I can understand that a woman looking to get married may decide that a man is such a poor economic prospect that he's not husband material (even if a husband with a low income is better than no husband and no income). But how then is that same man, or a string of them, worthy of fathering her children?

And if not worthy of fathering her children, how then worthy of a degree of intimacy once reserved for husbands? The evil of objectification rears its head in multiple corners: loose sex inherently presumes that the other person is merely for pleasure, which is what exempts him or her from being judged by the scale of a lifelong partner, and accepting your own sexual favor as something that can be doled lightly brings into view a price for allowing others to objectify you.

At this point, some minds will be entertaining clichés: that ship has sailed; the horse has left the barn. Sex is what it is, in our society, so why not err on the side of freedom? Let the men be honest about their desires and the women turn a profit. The tacit presumption, though, is that matter won't end badly.

Ships can be turned around over time; horses can be found; and if the legality-by-omission of prostitution in Rhode Island isn't sufficiently shocking to begin the return, then we'll have to hope that a chance remains to do so when the shock comes via discovery of Rhode Island's daughters' means of putting themselves through college.

Another Winter of Discontent

Perchance I wasn't alone among readers of Saturday's Projo opinion pages in recalling Mac's piece on NRO back in 2004:

In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.

What brought that to mind, of course, was an op-ed by a couple of Brown professors:

LAST WEEKEND, we joined hundreds of young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gathered near Washington, D.C., for the Winter Soldier Hearings: Iraq and Afghanistan. In a packed conference auditorium, under the glare of lights and the cameras of the BBC and other international and national media, former and active-duty troops brought the day-to-day reality of the war home to hundreds of people attending this historic event. They gave eyewitness accounts of what they saw and did with their units during the invasion and war whose fifth anniversary is upon us, as well as in the now six-year-old occupation of Afghanistan.

After decades of pining, the American Left is now full-boar reviving the '60s era, although they haven't gone quite so far as accusing our boys in the military of regular gang rapes of civilians. Still, those offering testimony do provide a veritable banquet for anybody drooling to undermine America's efforts overseas:

The veterans told of:

• U.S. troops raiding home after home after home in which no insurgent activity or evidence was found, terrorizing the families inside.

• U.S. troops kicking, butt stroking and clothes-lining Iraqi prisoners of war, whom they were told to always call “detainees” so that Geneva Conventions did not apply.

• U.S. troops spraying machine-gun fire into homes after hearing a single shot from somewhere in a village.

• U.S. troops throwing urine-filled bottles and feces-packed food at people walking along the side of the road.

• U.S. troops shooting farmers working in their fields at night (to take advantage of the erratic electricity to run their irrigation systems) simply because they were out after a U.S.-mandated curfew.

• U.S. troops commanded not to stop for pedestrians, and instead to run over anyone or anything in the road as their convoys roar down highways;

• U.S. troops commanded to destroy boxes containing entire archives of birth certificates of the people of Fallujah, after a U.S. scorched-earth campaign in that city in 2004.

... they emphatically declared in their testimony that crimes against the people of Iraq at the hands of the U.S. armed forces were not isolated incidents of pent-up resentment or a matter of a few bad apples spoiling an otherwise healthy barrel.

The acts were habitual, repeated and officially promoted or condoned.

The authors/anthropology professors, Catherine Lutz and Matthew Gutmann, suggest that we American citizens must "demand more honest media coverage of the war." Odd, then, that they cite Iraqi survey data from 2007, instead of the just-released, and much improved (from American's perspective) 2008 iteration (PDF). Funny that, with the 2007 data apparently before them, they refer generally to an "overwhelming majority of Iraqis [who] want the U.S. to leave the country, and to do so immediately," even though that 47% of respondents were outnumbered by the combined 53% who answered with some form of "remain until..." (a total that is now 63%).

That observation leads to others that bring into question the objectivity of the survey itself, which is annually sponsored by international media organizations. New this year was a question about credit and blame for improvements or lack thereof in security. Those who answered that security had improved were given the following parties on which to lavish credit:

• Iraqi Army (13%)
• Iraqi Police (18%)
• Muqtada Al-Sadr (5%)
• Awakening Councils (8%)
• Iraqi Government (26%)
• Other (30%)

While those who'd stated that things had worsened could allocate blame to the following:

• US forces operations (20%)
• Militias (13%)
• Al Qaeda (9%)
• Neighboring countries (6%)
• Politicians/political groups (11%)
• Iraqi Government (9%)
• Parties and their militias (18%)
• Other (18%)

What a respondent answered if he blamed al Qaeda militias affiliated with political groups and sponsored by neighboring countries is anybody's guess, but clearly only a small minority of the minority (26%) who said that the security situation had become worse blame the United States.

And on and on the thread of tweaks goes, leaving one in little doubt as to how a neo cultural revolution can be built upon air... and some fond memories.

Reflections by Bill Buckley and Pope Benedict XVI on our Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization tradition: "...how deep we fall...there is always hope...the one who has hope lives differently..."

William Kristol writes:

...Bill was a complicated man. In him, admirable but disparate qualities coexisted easily. Bill was at once remarkably ecumenical — and knowledgeably discriminating. He had a taste for profound reflection about man and God — and for fierce polemicizing against socialists and appeasers. He had a real joie de vivre — but also, perhaps like any thoughtful person, a streak of melancholy. He appreciated the intellectual arguments for pessimism, but he never yielded to the mortal sin of despair...

Peter Robinson writes:

..."We deem it the central revelation of Western experience," William F. Buckley wrote in 1960, "that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep....Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope."

(And, as an example of hope, read the rest of Robinson's post about Gorbachev.)

A more scholarly discussion of hope and its connection to faith can be found in Pope Benedict XVI's second encyclical, Saved in Hope, which includes these words:

...According to the Christian faith, "redemption" - salvation - is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present...The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known - it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life...

Seeing a Horton who Hears a Who

Took the gals to see Horton Hears a Who on Saturday (and I wasn't the only one). The ProJo gave it 5 *s. I don't know if it was that good, but it was pretty good. The kids enjoyed it, though it may have skewed a bit young for them, and there were enough pop-culture references to keep me mildly amused, though their post-modern "irony" may annoy some (a Henry Kissinger impression?).

Anyone familiar with the book knows the plot: Big Elephant hears people on tiny world located in speck of dust on top of a flower, no one believes him (no one else has Horton's elephantine hearing) and Horton tries to protect said world from calamity. The subplot surrounding the Mayor of Whoville (leader of the dust-folk, if you will) is essentially the same as the main plot surrounding Horton--no one believes the Mayor is in contact with a giant, invisible elephant in the sky. There is also the requisite cool relationship between the Mayor and his one non-communicative son, who doesn't want to be Mayor like Pops. This is resolved predictably, but sweetly.

Back to Horton. He's a school teacher whose chief antagonist is a priggish Kangaroo who "home-schools" her kid (er, joey) in her, well, pouch. Badump-bump. A culturally or politically aware parent will see this as the zing at homeschooling (and the presumed demographic that make up home-schoolers--religious conservatives) it's intended to be. But there is a whole lot more subtle criticism aimed in other directions--whether the filmmakers intended it or not.

The Kangaroo is mostly ticked off at Horton because he can't prove that the Who's living in that speck of dust really exist, but he still persists in claiming it to be true. His faith is unprovable, you see. Eventually, the Kangaroo's mildly annoyed comments turn alarmist when Horton's students start to claim they have also discovered "worlds" in flowers. She warns the other animals that Horton is going to do long-lasting damage to the children by teaching to believe in what they can't see, feel or hear. That Horton has to be stopped!

At first, Kangaroo attempts to get a humorously creepy bird to do her dirty work (he fails). Eventually, though, she manages to rile up the rest of the jungle creatures to stop Horton. Her clarion call? "For the children!" The ensuing stampede, complete with an army of monkeys, ends in Horton being captured....but all ends well. Horton even forgives the marsupial. But I was left wondering: does anyone know if Hillary Clinton has a pouch?

I jest only slightly. The Kangaroo character is more than just the archetypal busy-body who knows what's best for everyone. She doesn't just ridicule Horton for believing in what she finds unprovable, she actively seeks to take him down and destroy the object of his "faith." She appeals to emotion by using the welfare of the children as her call to arms to get her fellow animals moving. She even tries to use a bad bird to achieve what she perceives to be a noble end. Any means possible is acceptable in an effort to achieve the "right" outcome, you know.

Though the filmmakers may have intended the Kangaroo to be a stereotypical, hidebound conservative conformist, the character can also be interpreted to be an elitist who thinks she knows what's best for everyone and will go to great lengths to ensure her solution is enforced. Then again, it was just a kid's cartoon. But if my kids ask me about the deeper socio-political meaning of Horton, I'll be ready!

Self Invasion

Part of advice columnist Carolyn Hax's response to a letter asking about etiquette for not telling sexual partners how many have stood where they stand (so to speak) jumped out at me (emphasis added):

... since dismissing people as judgmental and insecure without giving them a chance to speak for themselves could reasonably be considered judgmental and insecure behavior, a good answer to the numbers question would be "Do you think it matters?" And if yes, then, "Why?"

If you get the "truth is important to healthy relationships" line in return, or some other guilt-generating vehicle, please don't question the need to resist this blatant invasion of self. There is a huge, gaping difference between telling a significant other you think it's distracting, silly, juvenile, pointless, judgmental, shame-centric and conducive to paranoia to discuss numbers, and lying.

Shouldn't romantic relationships entail a turning over of self? Little wonder our society is so out of whack when it is apparently a mainstream notion that freely chosen sexual partners should be suspected as pillagers on a probationary basis.

The sad misconception of the advice is that, if the promiscuity tally is to be taken as meaningless, it must be because it does not matter and is minimally relevant to self, to who one is. But it does matter, and we all know it matters, thus necessitating the airy use of post hoc masks such as "invasion of self." As if to say, "Don't look there, because that is my private self and has nothing to do with who I am."

The unraveling of our collectively knotted psychology is going to take centuries, and we're apparently not even done spinning it.

Knotting Some Public/Private Threads

One can hear, in the expected quarters, the admonition that Eliot Spitzer's $80,000 whoring habit is a private matter. I wonder how many who'd make that argument also see David Richardson's travails in Providence — where he recently requested proof of the citizenship status of an Hispanic customer to his store — as private.

I imagine that a sizable number of them would insist that Richardson's act, as a manifestation of racism, was a blight on our society and has repercussions beyond the individuals involved. But then, I'd say the same of adultery and prostitution.

Perhaps they'd take the tack that his business transactions are a public matter. But then a prostitute's business transactions would be the same, and a marriage is even more explicitly so.

The circumstances are different, of course, one involving an elected official and the other a store owner, but I don't see anywhere to draw a line between the two that makes one act private and the other public.

Screwing America's Young

Well, I know how to fix this. Let's focus on the how-to of "safe sex," destigmatize lascivious behavior, increase access to the abortive undo, remove pressure toward (indeed undermine the culture of) marriage, and attack anybody who voices opinions fitting the 1960s radical's definition of repressive:

About 1 in 4 teenage girls in the United States -- and nearly half of black girls -- has at least one sexually transmitted disease, according to a study released Tuesday, providing the first national snapshot of infection rates among this age group.

Those numbers translate into an estimated 3.2 million adolescent females infected with one of the four most common STDs -- many of whom may not even know they have a disease or that they are passing it to their sex partners.

"What we found is alarming," said Dr. Sara Forhan, a researcher with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the study's lead author. "This means that far too many young women are at risk for the serious health effects of untreated STDs, including infertility and cervical cancer."

Why the West's Worth Defending

Before giving six reasons that the West is worth defending, George Weigel writes:

In his book, "Without Roots," Pope Benedict XVI deplored the addiction to historical self-deprecation rampant at the higher altitudes of European cultural and intellectual life: a tendency to see in the history of the West only "the despicable and the destructive."

The same problem exists on this side of the Atlantic; in our universities and among our cultural taste-makers, the healthy western habit of moral, cultural and political self-critique can dissipate into forms of self-loathing. Perhaps a civilization can afford to think of its past as pathology when it has no competitors. That is manifestly not the case today, when the West is being challenged by radical Islamist jihadism and by the new and market-improved authoritarianism of China.

So, a question: What's right about the West, about this unique civilizational enterprise formed by the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome --- biblical religion, rationality, and the idea of a law-governed polity?

Reading what follows, the modern American may feel a jolt from the audacity of confidence. Are we even allowed to risk the appearance of chauvinism — thoroughly rooted in our religious tradition?

Public Service Announcement for Parents

Well, they've done the study, and the results are nothing if not surprising:

Here's one simple way to keep your children healthy: Ban the bedroom TV.

By some estimates, half of American children have a television in their bedroom; one study of third-graders put the number at 70 percent. And a growing body of research shows strong associations between TV in the bedroom and numerous health and educational problems.

Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.

One of the most obvious consequences is that the child will simply end up watching far more television — and many parents won't even know.

I will admit that I had a television in my room when I was a teenager... of course, I figured out a way to match multiple adapters in series to run cable television on my Commodore 64, so one could argue that the unhealthy effects of the tube were somewhat counterbalanced by the encouragement of geekhood (which isn't to deny that I finished off my teen years with a number of very unhealthy traits and habits).

Kerr-azy Education Solutions

Last week's stunner was a feeling of agreement with Bob Kerr:

No summits, no rigorous testing of teachers, can restore what has been lost in too many schools — the basic respect for learning and for the place a teacher holds in making good things possible.

Until we can reverse the damage done before some kids even show up for the first day of class, there is little chance that equal opportunity will be the rule in Rhode Island schools.

Of course, disagreement may arise over the symptoms of the "damage done" and would certainly arise over its causes. Some common ground exists:

... at the heart of it all, as always, is the man or woman who prepares a classroom in the morning to welcome students who carry a full load of electronic distractions and social problems through the door. ...

Until we know what it's like to work in an environment where eager participation in class by a student can bring ridicule or worse — where text messaging claims more attention than the mathematical equations on the board — we will only look silly rushing to judgment.

But what to do about those insidious "social problems"? Experience reading Kerr should lead one to expect the usual: welfare programs, subsidized child and health care, affordable housing programs, laws against discrimination, and so on. In short, the parade of policies that have stood the poor in such good stead, the lessons of dependency, and the sense that things not given are not achievable.

If I may be overly simplistic, the guiding principle of this approach is that material circumstances create culture. Conflicting examples of cultures of varying health and wealth, however, suggest that it is not so. Rather, selective acculturation is the wellspring of opportunity. The hope of "yes you can" is incompatible with the pledge of "here you go." Better to project the message: "this you must."

The kids don't "stare and scribble and scratch and fail" because "their only real failing was being born into lousy circumstances." They've been born into circumstances of which most people throughout history would be envious (the classroom being a central emblem). They sabotage their opportunities because trying involves risk. They mock each other's academic success because if they bring each other down, they can continue to blame the system, the Man, the society for not handing over enough to ensure better circumstances.

And the worst part of the whole scenario is how long that attitude has existed — and been readily identifiable. We're into decades, now, and unless we adults find within ourselves the confidence to dictate terms of responsibility, we will continue to damn the kids to lives of staring and scribbling and scratching and failing.

Who Wants to Kill Barack?

When speculation becomes front-page news, one gets the impression of legend building. If Barack Obama wins and lives to tell the tale, he'll be the One Who Lived. The great hope whom they managed to protect (unless the reality disappoints terribly):

His wife, Michelle Obama, voiced concerns about his safety before he was elected to the Senate. Three years ago, she said she dreaded the day her husband received Secret Service protection, because it would mean serious threats had been made against him.

The thing is: I've yet to hear of any actual serious threats being made. The fears appear all to be grounded in assassinations from decades ago. The Kennedys and King (somehow the attempt on Reagan's life is never mentioned).

Of course, more than one narrative can be constructed around the idea of a dead candidate, and I, for one, can't think of any more dangerous act — in a culture that produces semi-annual mass murders perpetrated, it seems, mainly for posthumous attention — than to splash across the news media fears of having to write a candidate's murder into the history books. That risky behavior raises an interesting question, though: Who would benefit most from the candidate's death?

More Derb on Mrs. O

John Derbyshire has done what few non-college professors are willing to do: he's actually read Michelle Obama's senior thesis. Overall, he believes (and I agree) that it will and should have minimal effect on the presidential race, but he makes a worthy point:

... the slight negative is negative because the thesis reveals a cast of mind that most voters find deeply unattractive. Plainly Mrs. Obama had that cast of mind in 1985. Recent remarks suggest she still has it. The fact that Barack Obama chose her as a wife and seems to get on well with her, indicates that he shares it. It's that deeply, unrelentingly critical way of thinking about the U.S.A., and about most of our citizens, that characterizes the "victicrat" — the person who has been taught, or who has taught herself, that she is a pitiful figure buffeted by hostile forces, whose only hope for survival is to return the hostility, and to band together with others like herself ("the Black community") for mutual aid, all of them in a hostile posture to the out-group.

Most Americans don't see our country like that, and have a low opinion of people who do. Millions of white — or, as Mrs. Obama writes, "White" — Americans would love to have had the breaks Mrs. Obama had, and resent the fact that they didn't have them because they don't belong to a designated victim group. They resent the ease with which two beneficiaries of those breaks can parlay their victim status into two six-digit salaries and a seven-digit house, without ever doing any kind of work that adds to the nation's wealth or security. And they especially resent that people who have attained those heights of success, with the assistance of those breaks, seem to nurse nothing but hostile emotions towards the country that made it possible for them.

This "slight negative" for the Obama campaign has been a tremendous negative for race relations over the past few decades, and to the extent that an Obama presidency reinforces the victimhood separatism of our recent history, it will prove to be a net loss for interracial harmony.

A President You Can't Get Out of Your Head

In today's Providence Journal, a young Ivy Leaguer with a hyphenated name adds too my still-short list of old-man moments (note the sentence that I've italicized):

But that is all that I have ever known as an adult: a reviled America under George Bush, and a Congress dominated by petty bickering instead of big ideas. The 2004 election offered an opportunity to vote for a Democrat, but few people my age were excited about Kerry. I have come of political age at a time when America is divided, disliked, and fading as the leader of the Free World. There is a thirst among young Americans for a new era of politics at home and abroad and for an America that is creative at home and respected abroad. And there is an overwhelming sense that only one person can usher in that new era: Barack Obama.

I was a bit younger than Mr. Cook-Deegan at the time, but my how that sentiment brings me back to the late-'80s/early-'90s. You want divided and disliked, whippersnapper? Take a look at the video that the British band Genesis aimed at our president in 1986. And as for our "fading leadership," I remember high school debates about Japan's ascendancy. (A curiosity for consideration at another time: Doesn't it seem that those who believe that the United States ought to be chastened by the world are often illogically quick to worry about our diminishing stature?)

Further stoking my incipient fogeyism, young Master C.-D. writes:

Now, at 22, I am a voting adult who comprehends the consequences of that election. I have friends from high school serving in Iraq. Now I understand the grave danger of alienating the Muslim world. I have traveled to over 25 countries. Nearly everyone I meet tells me how his or her respect for America has plummeted during the Bush presidency.

Central among the convictions of which the last decade of life has disabused me is that a twenty-two year old in modern society is necessarily (put aside legality) "an adult." "I was only a sophomore in high school," Patrick writes of the 2000 election, "I did not really understand what was going on." Myself, at 32, I'm daily more appreciative of how little I really understand what's going on.

But I do know enough to question the "nearly everyones" whom a traveling college student is likely to engage in discussion. I'd have to make a tally before I could confidently claim to have visited over 25 cities. One needn't travel far, however, to understand that this world contains all sorts of people, and that the best of them make decisions based on whether they are right or wrong, not on whether they will meet the approval of a foreign moral authority or bring into unadulterated harmony factions with wildly divergent beliefs and interests.

I wonder: Does our Brown history major understand the danger of not alienating the Muslim world? It's telling that he turns to personal conversations, rather than historical studies, to determine what his country ought to do.

Ah, this g-g-g-generation — "free from any huge upheaval like the 1960s" growing up "in a time when young men and women... have [all] had the same opportunities" in a post–Cold War, Internet-besotted era marking "an opportunity in history for the world to come together in a new way." Somehow, I suspect that many boys and girls have, in fact, not had the opportunity to be nation-hopping globalists. Some of them might even think to include 9/11 in a survey of their generation's formative experiences.

These colts of the academic world, chomping at the bit to apply their knowledge in the service of all that they have learned to be Good, would do well to consider the thoughts of elders with whom they disagree. Peggy Noonan, for example, has some edifying things to say about Mr. Obama:

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you're losing America, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

Patrick Cook-Deegan hears a "catchy new song with the sweet phrase, 'President Barack Obama.'" It's an infectious tune, I imagine, among those who trust (as I once did) that the world beyond the graduation podium is practically humming with the promised life. And the lyric suggests that those old-time Americans ought, if the world is good, to lose. It's progress, my aged friends. We must step aside so that fields of plenty may sprout on land that we only managed to trample in our own time.

We non-matriculating students of history — and of current events — may wonder whether we are merely clearing a path for an assault, an invasion, against which a dahoo-dorray refrain will prove to be little protection.

Denmark Burning

Ah the idyllic land of Northern Europe, to which the world's eyes turn for a vision of society as it ought to be:

Groups of youths torched schools and cars in a sixth consecutive night of violence across Denmark, mostly in immigrant neighborhoods, police said yesterday. Forty-three persons were arrested.

The spate of vandalism started last weekend and some think it intensified with the reproduction of a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers Wednesday.

"Some observers said immigrant youths were protesting against perceived police harassment, and suggested the reprinting of the cartoon may have aggravated the situation." Roger Kimball's got some suggestions, too:

One thing we all do know is that Muslims are "offended" by depictions of the Muhammad. In fact, the list of the things Muslims are offended by would take over a culture. They don't like ice-cream that (used to be) distributed by Burger King because a decoration on the lid looked like (sort of) the Arabic script for "Allah." They are offended by "pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet" appearing in the workplace. They take umbrage at describing Islamic terrorism as, well, Islamic terrorism and have managed to persuade Gordon Brown to rename it "anti-Islamic activity." But here's the thing: one of the features of living in a modern, secular democracy is that there is always plenty of offense to go around. No Muslim is more offended by cartoons of their Prophet than I am by their barbaric reaction to the cartoons. But their reaction when offended is to torch an embassy, shoot a nun, or knife a filmmaker. I write a column deploring such behavior. You see the difference.

Final moronic comment from Reuters: "Social workers said the arrests, the reprinting of the cartoon and protests against its appearance might have fuelled the riots." You don't say? How many social workers did it take to figure that out?

There's much work left to do, apparently, kicking such Westerners as supply the culture of the world's news services out of their dogged fetal position. One gets the impression that many hope that electing the right president will allow Americans to join the Europeans in donning the armor of PC pieties. Then, in our much deserved vacation from history, we'll all be able to go back to marveling at the wonder of gay marriage from the North to the Baltic Seas.

Until, of course, the next building falls or, God save us, our first city evaporates.

Can't Blame 'Em

Filling in for Dan Yorke on 630WPRO, Matt Allen's been talking about the ability of apparent prosperity to elevate men's chances when it comes to wooing attractive women. I emailed him that the thought that money bought love used to really bother me. Recently, though, the amount that I work, the struggles to get by, the lack of resources for anything that falls short of necessity, especially in light of our children — these things have helped me to understand why the guys driving by my Newport construction site in their BMW SUVs so often have attractive passengers.

I can't blame the women. The life that you'll be able to have together is certainly a factor in one's attraction to potential mates, and money, prosperity, is a key marker.

I will say, however, that I'm glad that I looked unreasonably likely to be successful, when I was younger. It's too late for my wife; she's too heavily invested, at this point.

Re: The All-American, Union Family

Legend has it that, upon Napoleon's crowning himself emperor, Beethoven tore or scratched Bonaparte's name from his Eroica Symphony manuscript in a fury. The revolutionary inspiration had been perverted, but still, many followed the general even thereafter, some perhaps out of a nostalgic faith that the principles of liberté, egalité, and fraternité would win through until the end.

Thus must all movements that have gone sour barrel on with the blessings of well-meaning, good people whose lives are heavily invested in a formative period. Our narratives are surpassingly difficult to change, like watching the colors of the world invert, and the realities are almost irreconcilable in which, for example, a union local number evokes a contemptuous snort or the vision of a childhood barbecue, with its sense of safety and security.

I didn't live consciously through this change, but at some point over the past few decades American society shifted. Old ways of ordering our families and, extending that, our communities dissipated (or, more accurately, were attacked and decimated). It's easy, for example, to imagine public-sector unions of a previous generation voting, unbidden, to increase hours or cut pay for the benefit of the community. It could be the case, although I've no specific historical evidence, that a nearly universal impression of American union members in keeping with Michael Morse's memories helped to lead our society down the public union track, despite the obvious dangers that such an ordering presents.

If those days existed, they are gone, and who's to say but that the forward march of the union machine played a role in ending them. I can describe with confidence only the reality in which I find our state now, in the present. I can only testify to my experience, as a blue-collar worker, of being dismissed, in the Us v. Them bifurcation proclaimed by unionists, as a sycophant to the Establishment and that heartless class of avaricious businessmen.

Rhode Island desperately needs the all-American families of union members to look clear-eyed at the present and to ask themselves, with as much separation from their own circumstances as they can muster, whether their organizations further the American way of life, or just the Unionized American way of life.

I'm No Fool, No Siree, I'm Gonna Live to Be Two-Hundred and Three Eighty-Three

I'd have added some sort of spiritual fortification to Dogbert's advice, but his assessment is compelling.

It reminds me of one of my father's favorite topics: the notion that production and healthcare both are going to create a reality in which none of our historical social models apply. Everybody's going to live a very long time, and nobody's going to actually have to do anything (with automation and whatnot). So how are we going to order our society, especially with regard to distribution?

Personally, I think that analysis too greatly minimizes human hamartia, projecting the future based on the misleading present. Whatever the case, I'm also reminded of a small diner in the town in which I went to high school that served a particular breakfast sandwich called the Zebra. It was essentially an entire cholesterol-rich breakfast on toast.

It might be an appropriate use of government resources to distribute those around the country...

Another Re: Marisol's Odds Go Down

Andrew notes that marrying the future mother of his child would have put Mynor Montufar on the path to citizenship. The various considerations that go into figuring out why that was a road not taken highlight the fact that, while not all decisions follow rational thought processes, incentive structures still apply broadly.

As Andrew describes in the comments to his post, the process of becoming a citizen based on a spouse's status does require a number of forms and a $1,000+ in fees. An illegal immigrant would also not likely wish to enter into the system (although this one was willing to have his mug published in the state's major newspaper). Getting caught isn't the only disincentive, however. Although I don't know whether it applies in this case, adding a father's (or a husband's) income to the household total might decrease government benefits, and in Rhode Island, children (i.e., their parents) continue receiving support even when it has expired for the adults.

Illegal immigration and poverty advocates look at this set of incentives and see harmfulness in the restrictions. The fees and forms (and risk of getting caught) provide disincentive to get married, as do the decreases in public support. To them, illegal immigrants ought to be able to live openly, applying for licenses and benefits as if they were citizens, and recipients of government money ought to be able to collect up to higher boundaries. To the contrary, such an approach only makes the incentive structure more perverse: Immigrants have no reason to pursue citizenship, and many to avoid it, and women have incentive to produce even more children whom they lack the resources to support.

The villain in the scenario is ultimately the act of immigrating illegally. Its co-conspirator is destigmatization of living on the public dole. A third culprit, easily forgotten after its victory, is destigmatization of out-of-wedlock procreation.

Again, I've no information about the government support of the specific family in question, but it oughtn't be a matter of contention to suggest that the subculture affects their decisions regardless. In that context, the names of young Marisol's closest relatives convey discouraging information:

• Father: Mynor Montufar
• Mother: Carmen Marrero
• Maternal grandmother: Lilliam Muniz

A shared name does not a family make, of course, but I don't think it's mere knee-jerk traditionalism to suggest that it is not entirely devoid of importance and that it often comes in conjunction with other qualities for which society ought to provide incentive, sometimes in the form of disincentive for alternatives.

Marisol's Odds Go Down

Although I'm not in a position to provide links right now, I wanted to mention something that I just heard on WPRO: The unwed, nineteen-year-old father of Rhode Island's first-born baby of 2008 was just taken in under suspicion of being an illegal alien. Apparently, a housemate of the young couple was found dead (perhaps suicide).

A Baby for the New Year

What a sad, sad commentary that the first baby born in Rhode Island during 2008 was child number three to a nineteen year old girl. The picture of the mother with the baby and the father (different name; no mention of whether the other two are his) is worth a thousand words.

Mom expressed hope that the child's 1/1 birth portends an important life. Sad to say, Ms. Marrero, but you don't appear to be starting little Marisol off with the best of odds.

Don't Make Your Daughter a "Skank"

As I've written before about the perils of allowing our kids--especially our daughters--to be to "in the know" about the latest tween pop culture icons. Being a Dad to a couple 'tween girls certainly heightens one's awareness of how our culture seems hell-bent on having our girls grow up too fast. Today's ProJo contains a piece by Debra Curtis, an anthropology professor at Salve Regina University, who argues that parents should resist our pop cultures penchant for sexualizing girls (Bratz dolls, for instance!) I don't know if Curtis is going too far, but she's worth listening too.

Men who prefer prepubescent girls sexualize them. In the eyes of a pedophile, girls are highly eroticized objects for their sexual pleasure.... I can say without a doubt that 99 percent of mothers would just as soon cut off their right arms as permit their daughters to be alone in a room with a known pedophile. And yet, these same mothers are seduced by, and let their daughters be seduced by, the demands of our popular culture, which sexualizes girls. We all know what this looks like — preteens dressed as young adults, the 6-to-10-year-old set wearing cropped tight-fitted T-shirts, low-cut jeans, jewelry and lip gloss — over-sized and hyper-sexed Bratz dolls. The message is clear, “looking fashionable means looking sexy.” On the positive side, a slow but growing social commentary is critical of this unhealthy trend. My personal favorite is